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Book JAS^lja 



A 

DISCOURSE 

IN MEMORY OF 

ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER HODGE, D. D., LLD, 

i 

PROFESSOR IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, 

PRINCETON, N. J. 

BY 

FRANCIS LrPATTON, D.D., LLD, 

Professor in Princeton Theological Seminary. 



I887. 



<L h & tn (1 



Copyrighted 1887 
JOHN WANAMAKER, 
Philadelphia. 



Press 

TIMES PRINTING HOUSE, 
Philadelphia. 



^his Discourse was delivered in the Chambers 
Presbyterian Church, 2ist December, 1886, in 
Compliance with an Invitation from the Phila- 
delphia Presbyterian Ministerial Association, 
and is now published at their Request. 



I 



MEMORIAL DISCOURSE. 



[ FEAR that I have little fitness for the service 
I have been so kindly invited to perform, be- 
yond the fact that I had a share in Dr. Hodge's 
confidence, that I loved him dearly, and that dur- 
ing the short period of my acquaintance with him 
I had come to know him well. It has occurred to 
me more than once since the preparation of this 
Discourse was undertaken, that some one who had 
known him longer and whose record of memories 
reaches back to the years of a common boyhood 
would have done ampler justice to this occasion. 
For, when a great man dies, there is a natural, 
and surely a pardonable, curiosity on the part of 
all to know something of his early life. We love 
to study his history in the light of the facts 
that made up the totality of his career, and to 
read in stories of his childhood the promise of a 
greatness attained in later years. In the case of 



5 



one like Dr. Hodge, whose personality was so 
unique, so manifold, and so manifestly marked 
by genius, we naturally suppose that those who 
have been his companions for a lifetime are in 
possession of reminiscences that would abun- 
dantly gratify this very natural desire. It may 
yet fall to the lot of one specially qualified, to 
do what obviously I cannot do. I must content 
myself with describing what I saw, and repre- 
senting Dr. Hodge to you as he appeared to me. 
That we were engaged in kindred pursuits, that 
we had both taught from the same text-book, and 
had traversed in frequent conversations the lead- 
ing topics embraced in Dr. Charles Hodge's Sys- 
tematic Theology, may qualify me in a measure 
for forming a just estimate of his position in the 
theological world. This estimate I shall at least 
try to make, not in the form of fulsome eulogy — 
for a simple statement of the truth will be eulogy 
enough — but in tender regard for his precious 
memory and under the restrictions of sober fact. 

The death of Dr. Hodge is such a sore be- 
reavement to our entire Church, that a memorial 
service held in the midst of a larger community 
than that embraced in the University-town where 



6 



the last years of his life were spent, seems emi- 
nently proper ; and I know of no place where 
that service could be more appropriately held 
than in this city of his forefathers, the city that 
he loved above all others, and for which his last 
and ripest work was done. On this day of the 
week and at this hour of the day, many of you 
had hoped to hear his voice not many days hence 
as you heard it last winter, when he exhibited 
so clearly, with such aptness of illustration and 
characteristic affluence of expression, the great 
doctrines of our faith. How little any one dreamed 
that death would give such significance to his 
closing words when for the last time he addressed 
the large audience that had gathered week by 
week to hear him ! How little did any one sup- 
pose that these closing words were to be 
treasured afterwards as the swan-song of the 
dying theologian ! — " We shall meet together 
here no more. Let us pledge one another to 
reassemble in heaven. We part as pilgrims 
part upon the road. Let us take our way 
heavenward, for if we do we shall soon, some of 
us very soon, be at home with the Lord." His 
removal is God's strange work. We can only 



7 



say : " I was dumb, I opened not my mouth be- 
cause thou didst it." We bow submissively to 
our Father's will, and are here to-day to thank 
God for the life of Archibald Alexander 
Hodge, to read afresh the record of that life, and 
in its lessons find new inspiration. 

Philadelphia, as I have said, was the city 
of Dr. Hodge's ancestors. His great-grand- 
father, his grandfather, and his eminent uncle, 
lived and died here. His mother's ancestry, in 
several lines of descent, is still numerously rep- 
resented here. His father was born here in 
1797, and married here in 1822. Archibald 
Alexander was born in Princeton on the 18th 
day of July, 1823. An old frame-house on the 
corner of Witherspoon Street is still pointed 
out as the place where he first saw the light. 
He grew up in an intellectual atmosphere. 
During his boyhood his father's study was the 
meeting-place for all the great lights of Prince- 
ton. The Old and New School controversies, 
and the New Haven Divinity were discussed 
in his hearing by men like Dod, the Alex- 
anders, John Maclean, and Charles Hodge. The 
Princeton Review began its career in his boy- 

8 



hood, and he was familiar with all the men 
who were active in its organization. If there 
is any advantage in breathing " the atmosphere 
of floating knowledge," which Dugald Stewart 
says is " around every seminary of learning > ,, 
Archibald Hodge must have enjoyed it to the 
full. Yet he does not seem to have been a 
very studious boy or over-fond of books. I 
am inclined to think that boys, as a rule, 
do not care much for intellectual atmospheres, 
and that they do not profit so much by their 
environments as we might suppose. Books are 
too numerous to be counted luxuries by the 
sons of literary men, and literary men them- 
selves come into too close contact with their 
sons to be their h'eroes. It is the boy who 
gets knowledge under difficulties, who buys his 
Virgil only by saving pennies, who has felt the 
pangs of book-hunger without the means of 
gratifying his appetite, that is more likely to 
develop a love of reading and to devour libra- 
ries. Thirst for knowledge young Archibald's 
environment did not give him. But it gave him 
the air of one who is to the manner born. It saved 
him from priggishness and conceit. It kept him 



9 



from displays of vanity and egotism that are 
so apt to mar the greatness of men who have 
transcended the intellectual conditions of their 
childhood. In College he was one of Profes- 
sor Henry's most distinguished pupils. It was 
through the influence of this eminent man that 
he developed the taste for physical science that 
he retained through life ; and it is probable, that, 
next to his own father, Professor Henry exerted a 
more formative influence upon his mind than any 
other teacher he ever had. He was graduated 
in 1 84 1 ; he taught awhile at the Lawrenceville 
School, and was for a year or two after that a 
tutor in the College. In the Seminary lie was 
one of a group of students, consisting, besides 
himself, of Messrs. Lacy, McPheeters, Phillips 
and Scott, who were specially interested in the 
study of Systematic Theology. Dr. Charles 
Hodge was then beginning to write his lectures. 
The members of this group distributed among 
themselves the work of taking a verbatim report 
of these lectures, which they were in the habit 
of putting together in connected form after the 
lecture was over. Besides this, they were re- 
quired to read Turrettin and present written 



10 



answers to questions which Dr. Hodge himself 
prepared every week. In these days of a 
crowded curriculum , it could hardly be ex- 
pected that students should devote so much 
time to a department as important even as 
Systematic Theology ; and now that they can 
for the first part listen indolently to lectures with 
a printed syllabus in their hands, the labor of 
taking notes has been greatly reduced : but there 
can be no doubt that those who were willing to 
work according to the old method just described 
became thorough theologians. It was through 
this method of study, taken in connection with 
conversations with his father on theological sub- 
jects, that Archibald Hodge laid the foundation 
for his own eminent career, though no one 
would have prophesied — and least of all his 
father — that he would one day be a teacher of 
theology himself. On one occasion, however, 
he won a compliment from his father which he 
must have valued highly, for he has told me 
the story more than once. It seems that he had 
written an essay, and on reading it to Dr. Charles 
Hodge, that distinguished theologian looked up 
with an expression of pleased astonishment on 



I T 



his face, and said that Alexander must read the 
essay to the class. I would give a great deal to 
see that essay; for I doubt not that it would 
be another illustration of the well-known fact that 
a man's best and ripest thinking often consists 
in the development of ideas that are germinally 
manifested in early life. I am pretty confident 
that the subject of the essay was the Relation 
of God to the World, — a topic which was the 
subject of Dr. Hodge's latest thought, and which 
he dealt with in a forth-coming article, the manu- 
script of which was placed in my hands only a 
few weeks before his death.* 

Leaving the Seminary, Archibald Hodge 
offered himself to the Board of Foreign Missions, 
was accepted, married, and sailed for India in 
1847. His stay in India was short, owing to his 
own illness and that of his wife. He rendered 
important service, however, to the Mission at 
Allahabad, harmonizing discordant elements and 
gaining personal influence and affection, which 
rendered his return a serious disappointment to 
his colleagues. But what was far more import- 
ant, his experience in the mission-field enhanced 

^Presbyterian Review, January, 1887. 

12 



his zeal for the mission-cause, gave him a grasp 
of the missionary problem, and an interest in 
missionaries that made him always the trusted 
counsellor of all those among his pupils who 
contemplated a missionary career. If the stu- 
dents wished advice, they went to him : if the 
Sunday evening missionary meeting was to be 
addressed, he was called upon : if, at the Monthly 
Concert, the expected speaker failed to arrive, he 
was called upon : if the son of a converted Brah- 
min was sent here to be educated, he was his 
guardian : if a penniless Oriental, bent on knowl- 
edge, and seeking it, that he might carry the gos- 
pel back to his countrymen, sought premature 
admission to the Seminary, he found an eager 
advocate in Dr. Hodge, if anything could be 
said in his behalf; and if, as sometimes hap- 
pened, it was necessary to let him know that his 
coming had been a mistake, kind words from 
Dr. Hodge, and not infrequently a draft upon 
his exchequer, sent him away in peace : if the 
Inter-Seminary Missionary Conference held its 
meetings at Hartford, Dr. Hodge must make an 
address : if it met in Princeton, Dr. Hodge at 
least must pray. 



13 



Dr. Hodge returned from India with his 
wife and two children in 1850. In 1851, he 
settled in Lower West Nottingham, Md. It was 
a rural charge, and the salary — a little more than 
six hundred dollars a year — was very inadequate: 
but it was better than nothing, and it afforded him 
an opportunity to preach the gospel. He was 
not indifferent to pecuniary compensation, nor 
ignorant of the purchasing power of money. On 
the contrary, his action in this instance is admir- 
ably illustrative of the wise and cautious fore- 
thought in money-matters, which characterized 
his whole life. He did not put the call in his 
pocket and wait for an opportunity to compare 
it with another ; nor did he act like an auctioneer — 
using a bid from one church to stimulate a higher 
bid from another ; nor did he get his friends to 
correspond with such vacant churches as he 
deemed worthy of being served by his gifts ; nor, 
going to West Nottingham, did he plan for a 
scale of expenditure exceeding his income, with 
the idea that when his necessities became known 
friends would rally to his support. He went 
there with a deliberate determination that, come 
what may, he would live on his salary and keep 



14 



out of debt. He even took a few dollars that he 
had in his possession, and, providing against the 
direst contingency possible, secured a policy of 
life-insurance; and actually lived without debt 
and paid his premiums — an example, I think, to 
multitudes in the ministry and out of it, whose 
lack of thrift and forethought has far more 
to do with the distress of widows and orphans 
than is commonly supposed. I mention this, 
because there are men among us who remain 
unemployed simply because they will not take 
the churches they can get, and who seem to 
have the impression that if they bury themselves 
in small places remote from cities and away from 
railroads, God will not know how to find them 
when the great work is ready which he has for 
them to do. But He found Alexander Hodge 
when the church in Fredericksburg was vacant 
in 1855 ; He found him when Wilkes-Barre 
wanted a pastor in 1 861 ; and He found him 
again when Allegheny Seminary stood in need 
of a systematic theologian in 1864 — each step 
proving in the end to be a preparation for the 
work that Dr. Hodge was subsequently to do 
in the Chair of Didactic Theology in Princeton. 



15 



Few men have the courage to seek obscurity for 
the sake of its advantages, but there can be no 
doubt of the intellectual advantages of a quiet 
country charge. When I hear men complain of 
the lack of stimulus in a rural parish, or find 
them longing for opportunity to preach to audi- 
ences more cultivated and worthy of their talents, 
I feel disposed to think that the poor quality of 
their intellectual fabrics is due not so much to 
lack of proper appliances, but rather to dearth of 
the raw material. Many a man will tell you that 
he owes all that he ever afterwards became, to 
the circumstance that, under God, he enjoyed 
the quiet of rural solitude, and had opportu- 
nity of uninterrupted thought and reading. 
Though not a prolific writer, Dr. Hodge was 
always busy with his pen, and it is worth while to 
remember that the " Outlines of Theology" was 
not the fruit of a leisurely professorship. It went 
out from the little study in the parsonage at 
Fredericksburg; and what has since that day 
become a text-book in theology in different 
languages was first of all preached to a congrega- 
tion of Presbyterians in Virginia. It is said, some- 
times, that we cannot preach theology. Here is 



1 6 



a theology, however, every word of which was 
preached, and not only preached, but listened 
to with eagerness, first in Fredericksburg and 
afterwards in Wilkes-Barre. It was during his 
Fredericksburg pastorate that Dr. Hodge became 
aware of his power of extemporaneous address. 
From that time and increasingly until his death 
he was pre-eminently a preacher. When he went 
to Allegheny his gifts soon became known, and 
he was in very general demand. Before long he 
accepted the pastorate of a congregation there 
which soon built and organized what is known as 
the North Presbyterian Church; and continued to 
perform the double function of pastor and profes- 
sor until he came to Princeton. I have never heard 
that any one found fault with him on the ground 
of " pluralities." It would have been most unwise 
to do so. Dr. Hodge was not the less a professor 
by being a pastor. He never would have been a 
man of distinguished theological erudition, with 
the most abundant leisure ; for, though fond of 
reading, he had not the tastes of a specialist. The 
two functions in his case acted and reacted in favor 
of each other. His profound knowledge of the- 
ology, his habit of pondering upon theological 



17 



problems, his power of minute analysis, and his 
determination to see every subject with which he 
dealt in its various relations, made preaching a 
very simple matter, and he fed his congregation 
with the finest of the wheat. On the other hand, 
the necessity under which he rested of presenting 
theological truth in forms suited to the minds of 
ordinary people, fostered in him his natural gift 
for illustration and saved him from becoming a 
mere dealer in the dry formulas of scholasticism. 
Many a spark struck out in the class-room was 
fanned into a flame of glowing illustration in the 
pulpit; and many a popular sermon, I venture to 
say, served to light up and lend fervor to the 
scientific discussions of the class-room. There 
was an interchange of amenities, I doubt not, be- 
tween the pulpit and the professor's-chair, that 
was of advantage to both; and the double duty 
he performed at Allegheny had much to do with 
the superlative eminence he afterwards achieved 
in doing what many will regard as, on the whole, 
the greatest work of his life. 

In 1877, it became apparent that some relief 
should be afforded Dr. Charles Hodge, who, 
though entering upon his eightieth year, was still 

18 



teaching both Didactic and Exegetical Theology. 
There could be no doubt respecting the man who 
was most conspicuously fit to be the associate 
and successor of Dr. Charles Hodge. It might 
seem like an ungracious act to bring him from 
Allegheny ; but when the interests of the Church 
at large were taken into account, there could be 
no doubt that it was of paramount importance that 
the chair of Systematic Theology in Princeton 
should be filled by the best available man. Dr. 
A. A. Hodge was one of Princeton's noblest sons, 
and his alma mater exercised her natural right to 
summon him to her help in her hour of need. 
He was inaugurated on the 8th November, 1877. 
Referring to this occasion, a writer in the Presby- 
terian said : " During all the services, we noticed 
that many eyes were turned to a corner of the 
church, in which a venerable man sat apart com- 
muning with himself, with his heart, doubtless, 
filled with varying emotions." The reference, of 
course, is to Dr. Charles Hodge, of whom his 
biographer says : " His mind must have gone 
back to August 12, 1812, when he, a stripling 
lying on the rail of the gallery of the same church, 
looked down on the inauguration of Dr. A. 



19 



Alexander to the same office. For from August 
12, 1812, to November 18, 1877, for more than 
sixty-five years, there had been only two pro- 
fessors of Systematic Theology in Princeton, and 
Dr. Hodge received the office from a man he 
delighted to call father, and now transmitted it 
to his son." 

The career of Dr. Charles Hodge was won- 
derful and beautiful beyond expression. During 
his long life of uninterrupted literary activity he 
had been brought into close relations with every 
active movement in what was a very active period 
of the Church's life. He had achieved eminence 
in every sphere of ministerial renown : preacher, 
debater, reviewer, exegete, ecclesiastic, historian, 
and systematic theologian, — he was great in each 
of these dimensions of measurement. His plans 
ripened, and hopes that others entertained in 
his behalf were fully realized. He garnered 
the wisdom of his life and left his Theology 
as a legacy to the world. When old age came 
upon him he stood between two strong sons who 
lightened his labors and afterward divided be- 
tween them the work that he left behind. He 
kept his faculties to the last, and taught his classes 



20 



within a few weeks of his death. His death was 
as ideal as his life had been : and, therefore, when, 
one beautiful afternoon in June of 1878, his own 
sons took up their sad burden and carried him to 
his grave, we all felt that everything was exactly 
as we could have wished. 

We must look now, however, upon a very 
different picture. The coming of Dr. A. A. 
Hodge brought new life to Princeton Seminary; 
and when his father died the work went on with- 
out abatement. He filled his father's place. In 
the pulpit, at the Conference, and in the class- 
room, he was a power, and was recognized as 
such by his colleagues and his pupils. We 
listened to him with pride and admiration, and 
derived from him intellectual refreshment and 
spiritual profit. We fondly hoped that many years 
of labor were before him, and that, like his father, 
by and by he would have a glorious sunset 
Alas for us! his sun has gone down at noon; he 
has been taken away in the prime of his man- 
hood, and when to all outward seeming he was 
physically and intellectually at his best. It is 
not strange that Princeton is in mourning. She 
has met as great a loss as she could possibly sus- 



21 



tain. Dr. Hodge was emphatically a Princeton 
man. He was born there. It was his father's 
home, and he was bound to it by a net-work of 
domestic relationships. He was loyal beyond 
measure to the ideas with which Princeton is 
identified, and loved to refer to her traditions. 
His large heart embraced the world, but no one 
could mistake the special place that Princeton 
had in his affections. In the distribution of 
hypothetical millions of which, according to his 
habit of jocose exaggeration, he was so fond, 
it was Princeton College and Princeton Seminary 
that he always thought of. Sometimes, when 
my own heart yearns for the scenes of my 
childhood and the blue waters of my island- 
home, I can appreciate his affection for Prince- 
ton : it was home. I believe that it gratified his 
heart's desire when he went back there to live : 
and after that, to be his father's successor, to 
sit in his father's study, to walk under the shade 
of the elms that his father had planted, and, 
in the ways opened to him by Providence, to do 
the kind of work his father did, was his highest 
ambition. I do not know what his epitaph will 
be ; but I venture to say, that no words will so 



well convey the idea of what he would regard 
as a rounded life of realized desire as those 
which state the simple fact that he was Third 
Professor of Theology in Princeton Seminary. 
Of course, since Princeton was so dear to him, he 
was correspondingly dear to Princeton. A shock 
of personal bereavement was felt by every one 
and by all classes when word went out on the 
morning of the 12th November that Dr. A. A. 
Hodge was dead. A man may do excellent work 
in his department and not be generally known 
in a community as small even as Princeton. 
Were such a man to pass away, the public might 
acknowledge that a great light had gone out, but 
he would not be generally missed. Dr. Hodge, 
however, was a citizen and did his duty as such. 
Everybody knew him. He was public-spirited. 
He helped every good cause. We met him in 
social circles and at the house of mourning. 
He was a leading man in his church and a 
trustee of the College. In the Faculty he mani- 
fested the excellences without the faults or 
defects which sometimes show themselves when 
men are associated together. He was not opin- 
ionated, nor arrogant, nor reticent, nor indifferent. 



23 



He pressed his views with manly confidence in 
their correctness, but could yield gracefully to an 
adverse decision. He was not simply attached 
to the Seminary. His life was grafted into its 
corporate existence, and he was always planning 
for its interests. He was frank, generous, full of 
good fellowship, and we were exceedingly filled 
with his company. His study-door, facing us as 
we went to and fro, was an invitation to turn in 
for a friendly chat. Ah ! the echo of his familiar 
greeting lingers in my ear, and I seem to hear him 
tell me to "come again." 

Men die, but institutions live. God, no 
doubt, will send a man worthy of the fourth 
place in this great succession.'*'- He may be as 
great and in some respects even greater than 
his predecessors, but no matter what his attain- 
ments may be, it is not likely that he can be to 
us what Dr. Hodge has been. The glory has de- 
parted from Princeton Seminary and the Church 
at large has lost a leader. I claim for him no 
supremacy, of course, among contemporary theo- 
logians, but no one will hesitate to make un- 
grudging recognition of his greatness. It will 

*Dr. B. B. Warfield, of the Western Theological Seminary, Allegheny, 
Pa., has since received and accepted a call to this position. 

24 



be hard to appreciate the magnitude of the loss 
which the Church has sustained unless we con- 
sider the many lines of activity along which 
Dr. Hodge was working. I sometimes meet with 
a statement (which looks a little like jealousy of 
the professorial function), to the effect that the 
pastors and not the professors determine the 
theology of the Church. It is true that the 
pastors teach the people and in that sense deter- 
mine the Church's theology : and from some of 
the specimens that have come under my eye of 
late, I should judge that it is very poor theology 
the people sometimes get. But who teach the 
pastors ? 

Think now of what Dr. Hodge was doing. 
Year by year he was sending forth men by 
forties and by fifties, into cities and towns, 
north and south, east and west, as settled pas- 
tors and as missionaries, to India, to the terri- 
tories, to South America, and the islands of the 
sea — preaching a theology which he had taught 
them. His pen was busy defending truth and 
refuting error. As a watchman on the walls of 
Zion, he was sleepless, vigilant, bold, clear-eyed, 
discriminating: not giving premature or unneces- 



^5 



sary alarm, not allowing the citadel to be sur- 
prised : faithful to the last degree, and when he 
put the trumpet to his lips, giving no uncertain 
sound. He was writing, preaching, lecturing, 
making addresses, coming into contact with men, 
influencing them and, by doing so, widening 
the influence of truth. Men far and near corres- 
ponded with him and sought his counsel. He 
had the confidence of the Church as few men 
have. The North loved him ; the South honored 
him. In Canada, in Great Britain, and over the 
wide missionary area, his judgments on theolog- 
ical matters were deferred to and quoted with 
respect. If a theological question was under 
debate, a few lines from his pen in a religious 
paper went the rounds of the press. Think now 
of the work that came to a stand-still when 
God's finger was laid upon that throbbing heart, 
and estimate, if you can, the loss that Christen- 
dom has sustained. 

Dr. Hodge was in the zenith of his power 
when he died. Every element that entered into 
his eminent reputation put on its best expression 
in the closing years of his life. Let us seek to 
form a just estimate of him as a theologian and 



26 



a man. We shall understand him better as a 
theologian if we know him as a man, for the ele- 
ments of manhood gave form to his theology : 
and we shall not understand him as a man if we 
do not know him as a theologian, for theology 
was a large part of his manhood. His theology 
flashed into prismatic colors on the diamond- 
points of his manifold personality, and his man- 
hood was warmed by a religious fervor that 
streamed like the fires of the opal from the 
theological convictions imbedded in the core 
of his being. 

Systematic Theology is the most important, 
the most comprehensive and the most difficult 
of all the theological Disciplines. It is, in fact, 
the synthesis of them all. The ideal dogmatician 
should be a good philologist, a good exegete, 
and a thorough student of Biblical criticism. He 
should know the history of opinion and should 
understand the forces, ecclesiastical and philo- 
sophical, that in the successive centuries have been 
at work on doctrinal beliefs. He should be able to 
prove the separate doctrines from Scripture, to 
defend them against error, and then, looking at 
them with the eye of an architect, build them into 



27 



system. It is, therefore, very seldom that we find 
an ideal systematic theologian. It is seldom that 
scholarship, erudition and philosophical acumen 
meet in such proportions in any individual as to 
produce this result. We must be contented, 
therefore, to find men in whom the predominance 
of any one of these qualities implies a relative 
deficiency of the other two. We must bear this 
in mind when we undertake to form an estimate 
of Dr. A. A. Hodge. When he entered the 
Theological Seminary he had the education 
which the ordinary American college offered 
its students forty years ago. He was gener- 
ally well-informed, fond of physical science, 
interested in metaphysical problems, and pos- 
sessed of fair classical attainments. He was a 
diligent student of Systematic Theology in the 
Seminary, as we have already seen, and went out 
well furnished with a theology that he under- 
stood thoroughly, and could use with facility. In 
after life, and through a professorial career of 
over twenty years he devoted himself exclusively 
to this department. He made himself acquainted 
with the creed-statements of the Church, and 
knew both their contents and the history of their 



28 



formation. He was a diligent reader of the books 
that trace the development of doctrine, and that 
discuss historically or polemically the great sys- 
tems of theological opinion. He was a student 
of the Bible, and divine testimony was his test 
of every doctrinal statement. We can see in 
his " Outlines " how constantly he appeals to the 
Scriptures, and how much he refers to the great 
Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century. 
Yet he was not distinguished either for erudition 
or scholarship. His distinguishing characteristic 
as a theologian — I mean, as compared with others 
of the class to which he belongs — was his power 
as a thinker. He had a mind of singular acute- 
ness, and though never a professed student of 
metaphysics, was essentially and by nature a 
metaphysician. He had great reverence for God's 
word, and was jealous of the intrusion of philos- 
ophy into theology : but he was, nevertheless, 
by temperament and by habit, a philosophical 
theologian. He loved the " high priori road/' 
and might have been seen walking on it in many 
an hour of quiet contemplation. He loved some- 
times to take short cuts to his conclusions, seeing 
in advance of special induction that, since this 



29 



and that are so, this and that are also so. He 
would not manipulate texts, however, to serve 
the purposes of foregone conclusions, nor build 
towering structures of dogma upon the obiter 
dicta of inspired writers. He had broad and 
scientific ideas of what a dogmatic induction 
ought to be, though he did not have the patience 
requisite for minute exegetical investigation. He 
was always reasoning on the relations of doc- 
trines to each other, and to the great scheme of 
grace. But he never ceased to affirm our entire 
dependence upon the Bible \ox the authority 
of doctrines ; and so distrustful was he of human 
reason, so conscious at the same time of the 
injury that has resulted from the alliance of 
theology with a false philosophy, that I believe 
he would hardly have liked it if I had called him 
a philosophical theologian. Yet, that is what 
he was. Theology was to him a revealed world- 
view. He would have said with Henry B. Smith, 
" Incarnation in order to Redemption," and 
thereby have expressed his philosophy of reli- 
gion. He would also have said, Redemption and 
Incarnation for the greater glory of God, and 
thereby have expressed his philosophy of history. 



3° 



Think then of Dr. A. A. Hodge as having 
an acute mind ; interested in theological specula- 
tion ; rethinking independently the old questions ; 
analytic in his mental processes ; full of scho- 
lastic subtleties ; bold, confident, intense in his 
convictions ; filled with reverence for good tradi- 
tions; holding the Reformed faith as a sacred 
trust, and also as a personal possession ; pervaded 
by this faith and living on terms of easy familiarity 
with it ; able to distinguish between essence and 
accident, and knowing when harmless idiosyn- 
crasy runs into serious doctrinal divergence ; 
strong in his convictions, but not litigious ; tena- 
cious of principle, but never sticking in the 
bark : a sturdy, robust thinker, always ready to 
defend the faith : a brilliant thinker, so that, as 
circumstances required, he could send truth out in 
the shining drapery of soft and beautiful speech; 
or shoot it forth like forked lightning, hot and 
scathing, to leave on the face of error the scarred 
record of its presence — think of him, I say, as 
exhibiting this many-sided mental expression, 
and you have my conception of the type of theo- 
logians to which Dr. Hodge belonged. Beyond 
all question he takes his place among the great 



men of America and the great theologians of the 
world. 

As to the contents of Dr. Hodge's theology- 
it is enough to say, that it was the theology of 
the Reformed Confessions and the Shorter Cate- 
chism : it was the theology of Paul and Augus- 
tine, of Anselm and Calvin, of Turrettin and 
Amesius, of William Cunningham and Charles 
Hodge. He had no peculiar views, and no pecu- 
liar method of organizing theological dogmas. 
He was interested in the methods of other men, 
and probably took more trouble to compare them 
with one another than his father had ever done : 
but after all, he has no taste for theological archi- 
tecture ; and the old-fashioned four-square house, 
consisting of Theology, Anthropology, Soteriol- 
ogy, and Eschatology, with all its obvious faults 
of logic, pleased him by its roominess and sim- 
plicity. He taught the same theology that his 
father had taught before him ; but he was inde- 
pendent as well as reverent, and 1 prefer his state- 
ments sometimes to his father's. He saw that his 
father had occasionally spoken on such topics as 
Imputation, and Original Sin, without full knowl- 
edge of the history of opinion, and he was more 



ready than were those who had passed through 
the heat of controversy to see that the doctrine 
of Original Sin is more essential to Calvinism 
than the mode of explaining or accounting for it, 
whether that mode be Imputation, Realism, or 
Heredity. A strict jure divino Presbyterianism 
would have found in him a poor advocate, organ- 
ization being in his view not of the essence of 
the Church. He knew that prelacy was old, but 
he abhorred Apostolic Succession. He was a 
Presbyterian by inheritance, and so far as the 
main principles of Presbyterianism go, by convic- 
tion. He regarded all man-made schemes for 
the reunion of Christendom as Utopian, whether 
proceeding on the basis of the prayer-book or 
of prelacy. But he loved to dwell upon the 
historic continuity of the Church through all the 
centuries ; accordingly he loved the " Christian 
year," and the great liturgical formulas that 
bind the centuries together. He was opposed 
to the reunion of the Old and New School Pres- 
byterian Churches, though I believe he voted for 
it at the last. It was impossible not to see that 
his sympathies were broadening year by year. 
In this he was in fact only giving further proof 



33 



that, theologically speaking, the sun of analysis 
had set, and the sun of synthesis had begun to 
shine. He saw, moreover, that in the new issues 
coming or already here, the old men on both 
sides would now stand shoulder to shoulder. 
He was delighted with Dr. Henry B. Smith's 
Systematic Theology, and cordially commended 
it to his classes. In a generous article, begun but 
never finished, it is pleasant to see how fairly 
and appreciatively he puts the two theologies, 
Dr. Smith's and Dr. Hodge's, side by side, and, 
overlooking minor points, treats them as the 
two great cis-Atlantic defences of the Calvinistic 
system. There was a hot controversy in the old 
days between Dr. Charles Hodge and Dr. Park, 
but in his late debate Dr. Park has had no greater 
admirer than he of whom we speak. Dr. Hodge 
had an accurate eye for theological perspective 
and presented truth in proper proportions. 
He held the church-doctrine regarding eternal 
punishment, and had he lived would have put 
on record a reasoned protest against the new 
belief in a second probation. But he would not 
have given the doctrine of eternal punishment 
a place co-ordinate with the divinity of Christ, 



34 



or the inspiration of the Scriptures. He was a 
champion of Calvinistic theology, but he rightly 
thought that the most important matter now is 
not the defence of Calvinism, but the defence of 
Christianity. Accordingly, in all his later writ- 
ings, he affirms with ever increasing w r armth the 
doctrine that the Scriptures are the very word of 
God, and the only infallible rule of faith and 
practice. He was impatient of any literary tam- 
pering with the Bible that would weaken its 
authority, or compromise its inspiration ; and he 
saw in the appeal to Christian consciousness, 
an attempt to overthrow the supreme authority 
of the Scriptures, and set up a subjective rule 
of faith under the sanctions of a pious plausi- 
bility. Dr. Charles Hodge took pride, I think, 
in saying on the occasion of his semi-centen- 
nial celebration, that Princeton had never origi- 
nated a single new idea. We all understand 
the sense in which that remark is true : it is in 
that sense, therefore, that I am to be understood 
when I say that Dr. A. A. Hodge made no origi- 
nal contributions to the science of theology. If 
he did, it w r as in his very able article entitled 
Ordo Salutis, published in the Princeton Review, 



35 



which I think he probably regarded as the best 
piece of theological work he ever did. 

I have been trying to show what Dr. 
Hodge was as a theologian. Perhaps I shall 
succeed better if I remind you of what he did. 
There were three modes in which Dr. Hodge 
declared himself as a theologian : by the Press, 
the Pulpit, and the Professor's-Chair. 

Great talkers seldom write much. Dr. Hodge 
was a genius in oral expression, in this respect 
resembling Dr. Archibald Alexander. But he 
wrote easily and with a running pen. His style 
is very spontaneous. His sentences artless, un- 
studied, sometimes exquisitely beautiful, some- 
times cumbrous and greatly needing the services 
of the file. He had, in fact, two styles. He was, 
on the one hand, a scholastic and full of scho- 
lastic distinctions, to which he attached great 
importance. He was very analytical, and when 
he wrote insisted on making these distinctions, 
and on marking them with formal exactness as 
he went along. So that it is not always an easy 
matter to thread our way through a thicket of 
lower-case letters, Arabic figures, and the same 
repeated in brackets, each serving to mark the 



36 



heads and sub-heads of an analysis increasing in 
minuteness at every step. This, however, is the 
style which we find in his " Outlines " and in the 
" Commentary on the Confession of Faith." It 
is the style in which he liked to do his serious 
work, and the only one by which, until recently, 
he had made himself known. On the other hand, 
he had a poet's eye for metaphor and a poet's 
ear for rhythm; and, had he chosen, could have 
excelled as a writer of English prose. Some of 
his shorter articles reveal his capacity in this 
respect. We all remember the characteristics 
of his style in these articles, — especially the 
long sentences, crowded with dependent clauses, 
cumulative, now arrested in their flow for the 
writer to make distinctions or guard against 
being misunderstood, now moving slowly on 
under a cumbrous weight of words, now spark- 
ling with simile, and then ending in a torrent of 
strong superlative epithets that were equally 
expressive of his admiration or his scorn. I 
recall his article on Dean Stanley in the Catholic 
Presbyterian, and his notice of Farrar's Bampton 
Lectures in the last Presbyterian Reviezv as illus- 
trating what I mean; though I think that for 



37 



effective writing and as illustrating a more chas- 
tened style, he has done nothing that is quite 
equal to his Biography of his father. His first 
book and the one by which he is best known was 
his " Outlines of Theology," published in i860, 
and at different intervals since republished in 
Great Britain and translated into Welsh, modern 
Greek and Hindustani.* Of course this work owed 
its first appearance to the relation of the author to 
his father; but it is an independent study of the 
topic with which it deals, and, particularly in the 
enlarged edition, is valuable for its concise and 
comprehensive definitions. Dr. Hodge's book 
on the Atonement was written during the agita- 
tion of the Reunion question, and is still one of 
the best treatises we have upon the subject. His 
" Commentary on the Confession of Faith" is a 
very useful book, full of clear thinking and com- 
pact statement. Dr. Hodge contributed also 
important articles to Encyclopedias — Johnson's, 
McClintock and Strong's, and also the Schaff- 
Herzog. He published several theological tracts 
and pamphlets, and was one of the founders 
of the Presbyterian Review, to the pages of 

*A translation into Malagasy is in progress and one into Italian contem- 
plated. 

38 



which he was a constant contributor. He wrote 
the important article entitled Ordo Salutis to 
which I have just referred ; he wrote a valuable 
controversial article for the North American; 
another on the reunion of Christendom for The 
Century ; and an admirably written paper from 
his pen on the subject of " Religion in the 
Public Schools " has appeared since his death in 
the New Princeton Review. But he was not dis- 
tinctively a writer of Review-articles as were 
his father and the late Dr. Atwater : his literary 
activity seemed to flow more naturally in other 
channels. 

Speaking of Dr. Hodge the other day, some 
one asked me if he was the pastor of a church or 
just a professor. I regarded the question as a 
naive expression of the popular estimate of the 
class to which I belong : and it may be true that 
we are not always interesting preachers. Those 
who reproach us for this sometimes do it kindly 
and under the guise of compliment, saying that 
we are too learned and preach over the heads of 
the people ; or they use great plainness of speech, 
saying that we ride hobbies in the pulpit, 
and preach old sermons full of the bones of 



39 



theology which, like those of Ezekiel's valley of 
vision, are very many and very dry. Dr. Hodge's 
preaching was not of this sort. He had been a 
pastor during most of his ministerial life and had 
been settled over four congregations. He there- 
fore knew the people. He preached old sermons, 
but, as he did not read them, he went through the 
process of thinking them over as often as he 
preached them. It was the old metal, but it 
went to the melting-pot every time, and the red 
wine of divine truth was poured into a shapely 
cup of the brightest silver. It was easy for him 
to preach, and he could interest and instruct an 
audience with very little effort. His materials 
were always within easy reach. Philosophical 
thought, theological dogma, historical facts, scien- 
tific illustrations, poetic images, personal expe- 
riences, local allusions, and suggestions springing 
out of recent conversations, were ever ready to do 
his bidding. He had only to will it, and they set 
themselves in array and passed the portal of his 
lips, a shining company, marching to the rhythm 
of a solemn music in the service of the Lord. 
There were some sermons that he preached habit- 
ually. They were never written, and, I fear, can 

40 



never be reproduced. These sermons had grown 
from small beginnings. They were never elab- 
orated, nor were they deliberately planned as 
great efforts. When a topic was in the preacher's 
mind he brooded over it, then preached upon it. 
If the subject opened promisingly, he would 
preach the sermon again. In the process of 
repetition from time to time it would naturally 
expand, take more definite shape, and become 
possessed of greater literary charm. In this way 
the sermon on the Resurrection became- one of 
Dr. Hodge's great discourses, and also that on 
the Person of Christ, and the Koinonia, and 
Miracles, and the Immanence of God, and — best 
of all, perhaps greatest of all — the sermon that 
he loved to preach so well, that has been 
listened to by so many congregations, that 
was preached in the Seminary Chapel and 
the College Chapel in Princeton, that was 
preached in this city, and New York, and 
Washington, and Edinburgh : the serrtion on 
"My Father's house of many mansions." There 
are few preachers like him. Indeed, he stood 
alone. To hear him when he was at his best was 
something never to be forgotten. All in all — in 



41 



thought, expression and delivery, each of these 
great sermons was a wonderful combination : it 
was a union of theology, philosophy, Christian 
experience, knowledge of human nature, quaint 
humor, elaborate description, a metaphor dropped 
as a diamond unobserved might fall out of a 
casket, facile utterance, a disdain of elocution, 
few gestures, the face lighted up, the eye opened 
wide as though the speaker saw a vision of glory, 
the voice trembling when the Saviour's name is 
mentioned, the sensitive frame responding to the 
pressure of emotion, and emotion finding vent at 
last in involuntary tears. 

Dr. Hodge was a man of wit and humor. 
He had a keen sense of the ludicrous. Had he 
chosen to make preaching a matter of Sunday- 
entertainment, he could have preached to packed 
audiences in our great cities. But with him 
preaching was a serious business; he thought 
that the pulpit was no place for joke or witticism, 
and never preached without producing upon his 
audience an impression of solemnity. As words 
are commonly used among us, I feel that I am 
employing a tame expression when I say that he 
was a great preacher. I think he was one of the 



42 



greatest preachers in this land ; and in compari- 
son with some who, by their concessions to a 
popular demand for pulpit levity and meretri- 
cious rhetoric are feeding the multitudes who 
listen to them with that which is not bread, and 
are called great by the world, he was — I am 
tempted to use his own favorite extravagance of 
speech, and say that he was — " infinitely" great. 

Yet let me not exaggerate : Dr. Hodge could 
be disappointing at times. Though he never failed 
to be instructive, the glow of enthusiasm was 
sometimes lacking ; and if anything occurred to 
interfere with his spontaneity, the weak voice and 
labored utterance formed a union hostile to ora- 
torical effect. Nor do I doubt that he revealed 
the highest qualities of his mind most frequently 
in the professor's-chair. As a former pupil, now 
a Free Church minister in Glasgow, writes: "It 
was in the class-room that he shone, or in a 
company small enough or congenial enough for 
him 'to commit himself unto them.'" 

It is possible to entertain several different 
views of what a professor's function ought to be. 
Much depends upon the department and not a 
little upon the man. According to one view, a 



43 



professorship means an opportunity for special 
investigation and leisurely research, the results of 
which are communicated in the lecture-room to 
men who desire knowledge. The desire to know 
being presupposed, the matter and not the man- 
ner of presentation is the main thing. The sub- 
ject is supposed to be treated completely. If the 
student does not intend to prosecute it further, it 
is probable that his best education in it is secured 
by his placing himself in contact with a living 
master and then reproducing in written form 
the substance of what he hears. If he intend to 
prosecute the subject by independent research as 
good a preparation for it as he can have is prob- 
ably of the kind described. According to another 
view, the academic lecture is intended to stimu- 
late interest in the department to which it 
belongs. It may deal in outline with the whole 
department, or be a discussion of a single phase 
of it. In either case, it is the particular contri- 
bution that the professor brings to the advance- 
ment of his science. But it is not intended to be 
a substitute for independent reading, and that 
mastery of the subject which only independent 
reading can give. With this view of the purpose 



44 



which it serves, a great deal depends upon its 
form: and, instead of being a series of paragraphs 
dictated to a class, or a compact and solid mass 
of fact or argument to be read slowly and trans- 
ferred to note-books, it is written with some 
regard to the requirements of literary art as 
something addressed to the ear and intended to 
please as well as to inform. According to still 
another view, the professor's business is to see 
that a certain definite body of instruction is safely 
and surely transferred from his mind to the minds 
of those who hear him. He is not only or even 
chiefly to present truth that men may receive if 
they choose : he is to see that they receive it. 
Each type of professorial work, when it is of a 
high order, will secure good results, and it is not 
well to institute comparisons between methods 
that are so different. The teacher of the first 
class will reach those who, either by natural taste, 
or the pressure of sufficient motive, are willing to 
undergo the labor of diligent note-taking. The 
man of the second class will communicate less 
knowledge, but will, perhaps, make up for this by 
the enthusiasm which he awakens. Men will, at 
least, listen to him with interest, will be enter- 



45 



tained, will absorb something, and a few will be 
put upon the road of special investigation and 
independent inquiry. The man of the third class, 
being less intent on giving than on seeing that 
the students get what he gives, will succeed in 
filling the largest number of minds with his 
teaching. He will, perhaps, so emphasize his 
duty as a teacher, that his students will miss the 
charm of feeling that he is a fellow-laborer with 
them in fields which they are invited to enter, and 
which to comers even as late as they still hold 
out the promise of reward ; but he will succeed 
in incorporating the body of truth which he 
expounds into their mental life. He will give 
them what can never be forgotten : a xrrjfjia ic dec — 
something that is their own, something indeed 
that is part of their very selfhood. Now it is 
easy to see that since Systematic Theology con- 
stitutes the matter that men are to preach, it is 
very important that the teaching of this depart- 
ment should be of the kind last referred to ; and 
I regard Dr. Hodge as the greatest teacher of 
this type I ever knew. He was exacting and in- 
tolerant of indolence and irregularity. He was 
very far from being a simple hearer of recitations, 

46 



but he insisted first of all that students should 
know the text-book, — and they usually did. He 
made use of his father's Systematic Theology ; but 
that book in his hands was like an illuminated 
mediaeval manuscript, and from title-page to colo- 
phon, it was filled with the bright, beautiful, 
quaint and sometimes grotesque creations of his 
fancy. The students saw every doctrine as it 
presented itself to his vision. They benefited 
by his power of concise statement and clear defi- 
nition. He held up the representative systems 
of theology with such sharpness of outline and 
such accuracy of articulation, that they knew them 
as one knows the face of a familiar friend. They 
questioned him, and he answered their questions. 
They raised objections, and so woke in him the 
hot fires of his polemic. They failed sometimes 
to comprehend a dogma, and he swept the uni- 
verse for illustrations, and poured them out so 
copiously and with such manifest spontaneity, 
that they overwhelmed him with their applause. 
" And yet," says one of his admiring pupils,* 
" he never confused simile and logic ; and 
although his wealth of happy imagery led him 

*Rev, Paul van Dyke. 

47 



to support many of his arguments with an illustra- 
tion, he often warned his students never to mis- 
take a metaphor for an argument. His logic 
was the logic of the Westminster divines, admir- 
ably suited to its purpose, exact, straightforward, 
and not lacking in the warmth of intellectual and 
emotional enthusiasm." I cannot do better than 
continue the quotation : " His patience and intel- 
lectual charity were both large, and he allowed 
the greatest freedom of debate to his scholars. 
In these contests, he was always chivalrous, and 
dismounted to meet his adversary on equal terms. 

His many peculiarities of speech 

and manner never impaired his courtesy as a 
gentleman or his dignity as a professor. He had 
a powerful brain, a large heart, and the simple 
faith of a little child. He taught the knowledge 
of God w r ith the learning of a scholar, the sym- 
pathy of a loving man, and the enthusiasm of a 
loving Christian." 

" I was struck," says Dr. Shedd, " with his 
great directness and sincerity, intellectually as 
well as morally. His mind, like his heart, worked 
without ambiguity or drawback. Hence his en- 
ergy in the perception and statement of truth — 



48 



a quality that showed itself in his uncommon 
ability to popularize scientific theology." This 
is said in full appreciation of Dr. Hodge's posi- 
tion as a scientific theologian, as will appear from 
another passage, where the same eminent divine 
says : " His published works show both logical 
and theological power. While founding upon 
the massive and luminous system of his vener- 
ated father, he methodizes, condenses, and forti- 
fies with an originality that evinces his compe- 
tence to have made a system of his own." And 
yet I think I am assigning Dr. A. A. Hodge 
his true place among contemporary theologians 
in this country and abroad if I say, in words 
suggested by the happy phrase of Dr. Shedd, 
that he is pre-eminently the popularizer of 
scientific theology. No better illustration of his 
power in this respect need be asked for than his 
lectures delivered in this city last winter. I have 
not alluded to them under any of the three 
categories to which reference has been made, 
for they are a combination of his powers in 
each of these three forms of manifestation, and 
are, indeed, the coronation of his public life. 
They were addressed to eager ears in this city, 



49 



but they were greeted, also, by eager eyes when 
they went out on their wider mission upon the 
wings of the newspaper press : and they will soon 
appear in a volume that will find a welcome, I 
hope, in many thousand households — and not 
in Presbyterian households only, for the truths 
declared in these lectures are, for the most part, 
the common inheritance of all who love the 
Lord; and by his defence of them Dr. Hodge has 
made Christendom his debtor. He was build- 
ing better than he knew. I remember very well 
how his characteristic modesty showed itself in 
connection with the printing of these lectures: 
how it distressed him to have his own quaint, 
and sometimes queer colloquialisms brought 
under his eye through the fidelity of a shorthand 
report ; and how, if he had acted upon his own 
impulses, he would have stripped these birds of 
paradise of half their plumage. But I am glad 
that we shall have at least one volume that can 
be trusted as a faithful mirror of his mental life. 
These lectures are not simply illustrations of his 
academic power, though his pupils will recognize 
in them the manner with which they are familiar. 
Nor are they simply sermons, though his ordi- 

5o 



nary pulpit discourse possessed many of the 
qualities that are present here. The preacher 
and the professor are alike visible in these lec- 
tures, and both in their best estate. Dr. Hodge 
was to have delivered another course of lectures 
in Philadelphia this winter. He was lecturing 
to large audiences in Orange, New Jersey, when 
taken ill ; and inquiries were already afoot 
respecting the possibility of having these lec- 
tures delivered in other cities. When I think 
of what he was doing, and of what, had his life 
been spared, he might have done, I am reminded 
of the day when Abelard lectured to vast audi- 
ences in Paris, waking a century from its intel- 
lectual lethargy, and filling the popular mind 
with enthusiasm for philosophical theology. 
And who can doubt that it is some work like 
that which Dr. Hodge was so well qualified to 
do, that our age and country need ? I do not 
take a discouraged view of things. As I look 
along the rugged coast-line of the centuries, 
my eye falls upon no high-water mark above 
my head, telling me where the tide of reli- 
gious life once reached. I believe we watch to- 
day a rising tide; though at this moment, it 

5i 



may be, we are standing on the sand left wet 
by a receding wave. But when I think that the 
narrow strip exposed to view by this receding 
wave extends so far adown the shores of life, and 
that the interval between its crepitant retreat 
and its tumultuous rebound may involve the 
fortunes of a generation, I have some sympathy 
with those who face the religious outlook with 
feelings bordering on fear. We see men turning 
away from God. They are drinking the wine of 
prosperity, and are intoxicated with worldly suc- 
cess ; or they have come to feel the hollowness 
of the world's promises, and have no refuge in 
a better life. We witness excess of luxury, and 
begin to apprehend the drying up of the chan- 
nels of benevolence. We take the census of the 
church-going population, and find that our houses 
of worship are poorly filled in the morning and 
almost deserted at night. Men who have never 
investigated a single doctrine pride themselves 
on their intellectual independence, and fall easy 
victims to the fallacies of a shallow skepticism. 
Ministers of the gospel feel the burden that is 
placed upon them; and, in order to escape the 
imputation of dealing in platitudes, or in their 



52 



endeavor to lift the gospel chariot out of the rut of 
routine, sometimes secularize their holy calling, 
deal in pulpit flippancies, and ensnare their audi- 
ences into the hearing of the gospel by intro- 
ducing it as a side-issue, and by way of remote 
allusions. We need a theological revival. We 
need an era of conviction. We need — if this 
appalling inertia and religious indifference is to 
be overcome — the outbreak of an epidemic of 
faith. We need a revolution of thought that 
shall reach the core of manhood and that shall 
make men see that they have forsaken God, the 
fountain of living waters, and have hewn out unto 
themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold 
no water. We heed a prophet who can speak 
in words that shine and burn. Alas ! our Elijah 
has been taken away, and there is no one who 
can wear his mantle. We can only hope, that, 
by the blessing of God, a portion of his spirit 
may come upon his surviving colleagues, upon 
the ministers of this city who meet here to-day 
to do honor to his memory, and upon the whole 
Church that is bereft of his leadership. 

It may seem to some of you that my admi- 
ration of Dr. Hodge has made me extravagant 



53 



in his praise, and that standing in the shadow of 
a great sorrow I have supposed that this theo- 
logical eclipse is visible over a wider area than 
it is. It is easy to fall into this mistake. But I 
believe that the judgments I have expressed are 
those of sober truth. From far and near, from 
other lands, and from all quarters of this land, 
the testimonies have come in that speak of the 
loss which Christendom has sustained in Dr. 
Hodge's death. Dr. Cairns, of Edinburgh, gives 
expression to a sentiment shared by multitudes, 
when in a letter to Mrs. Hodge, he says : " The 
whole Evangelical Church has lost in him a 
powerful and intrepid defender of its best and 
dearest beliefs ; and — strong as is the array of 
Presbyterians on your continent — he was a leader 
whom we could ill afford to lose." 

In presenting Dr. Hodge as a theologian, I 
have already in great measure described the man ; 
and yet I think we must come a little closer to 
his personality to get a full impression of what he 
was, and to understand the charm that invested 
his public life. The blending of attributes in his 
case, and the interpenetration of his public and 
his private life, are very well appreciated by his 



54 



pupil, Mr. Salmond, from whose letter I quoted a 
little while ago, when he says : " His courageous 
earnestness, with its other side of playful humor 
and quaint hyperbole, his burning sympathy with 
all that is good, and burning indignation at all 
that is false or mean ; his personal modesty, 
amounting even to shyness, with its counterpart 
of fearless and candid courage in defence of 
truth — qualities like these made him a model 
professor and an invaluable friend." 

Dr. Hodge was a high- minded, warm-hearted 
Christian gentleman. He was cast in a unique 
mould and was sui generis. He could only have 
failed to be a gentleman through an entire sus- 
pension of the law of heredity ; for he was allied 
on both his father's and his mother's side, and 
for several generations, to some of the best and 
most distinguished families in this city and this 
land. Aristocratic sympathies were very strong 
in him, and they found expression sometimes in 
an extravagant avowal of Toryism that was partly 
jest, and partly based upon a real conservatism 
of sentiment respecting the philosophy of social 
life. Though not violating proprieties, he had no 
sedulous regard for artificial and meaningless 



55 



conventionalities, and sometimes carried his in- 
difference to what other people say and do, a 
little further than he need have done. Like all 
men of genius, he was eccentric ; and like most 
positive natures, he had violent likes and dislikes. 
If he was in an abstracted mood, he might wear 
an air of indifference, which was in no sense 
intended for coldness. But he made no effort 
at concealment if men were not congenial to 
him, and he recognized his right to " shut men 
out of his universe," as he used to express it, 
without feeling that he had abated any of their 
claims. He was not indifferent to the luxuries 
that money will purchase nor to the avenues of 
usefulness that it opens ; and when associated 
with refinement, he had great respect both for 
it and its possessor : but he hated the sordid 
temper that money-making so often begets, and 
he had an unmeasured contempt for the 4< gold 
that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool." 
I think, too, that he sometimes underestimated 
the dimensions of the rich man's forehead. 
When his prejudices were not involved he could 
separate the chaff from the wheat in his estimates 
of men ; and I have known him to tolerate a 



56 



great deal of chaff for the sake of a very little 
wheat. He was a quick interpreter of human 
nature, discriminating in his judgments, and only 
slow — by reason of his own superlative honesty 
— to see the presence of sinister motives. At the 
same time, I cannot say that he was eminently 
judicial: his blood was too warm for that. He 
had a keen sense of the ludicrous, was full of 
pleasantry, and, sometimes, when unbending after 
serious effort, would abandon himself to a light- 
ness of manner and an Oriental luxuriance of 
speech, that I have no doubt have sometimes 
shocked those who regard the Professor of 
Theology as committed by his oath of office to 
a very sedate behavior. I think he had some- 
what against any man who could not appreciate 
a joke. He was full of persiflage, and was never 
happier than when he met his match in an en- 
counter of wit. His imagination never slept. It 
was constantly weaving new fancies and coining 
new figures of speech. He lived, indeed, in his 
imagination and systematically kept the ideal 
clock in advance of local time. He was always 
foreseeing contingencies and providing against 
them. He crossed bridges before he came to 



37 



them. Hence he was prompt, prudent and always 
beforehand. Hence, too, he suffered twice : suf- 
fered in the actual experience of pain, and suffered 
in anticipation of suffering. His imagination took 
hold of the possibilities of experience in dying 
and he shrank from them. The subject was often 
in his mind, and had been pondered, I doubt not, 
profoundly, although in his conversation on this 
and kindred themes, he would commonly veil the 
majestic depths of his nature by the ripples of 
pleasantry. He loved the beautiful, was fond of 
surrounding himself with beautiful things, and 
found no small share of his enjoyment in seeing 
how others enjoyed them. He was humble and 
had the most depreciative estimate of himself. 
He was capable of admiration, and I never knew 
a man who was so ready to give ungrudging praise. 
He loved with a large heart and a generous and 
most tender affection. Such a friend as he one 
rarely finds in this selfish world. I am glad to 
quote this testimony regarding him from one 
whom he greatly admired. Says Professor Young 
of Princeton : " I remember him as one of the 
most amusing, humorous and witty men I ever 
knew. He was one of the most affectionate and 



58 



tender-hearted, one of the most imaginative and 
poetic, and also, as such men sometimes are not, 
one of the most transparently and purely sincere 

and truthful I shall never forget 

some of our walks and talks when questions were 
raised and discussed relating to the incessant 
activity of God as the foundation of physical 
entities and forces ; or to the correspondence 
between revealed and humanly discovered truth, 
and the right relations and mutual respect to be 
observed between the interpreter of Scripture and 
the investigator of science ; or our debates as to 
the place and duties of earnest Christians in 
political society. I feel that I owe more to him 
intellectually and morally, for perhaps half a 
dozen hours of this sort, than to any but a 
very, very few of the instructors of my youth. 
He was broad and tolerant, an utter despiser of 
shams and conventionalities, and he went right 
to the bottom of things, penetrating almost in- 
stantly to the rocks and vacuums which equally 
limit our human powers of thought." 

Dr. Hodge was a timid child, and perhaps 
would have made a poor soldier. But he had 
the courage of his convictions. He was sincere 



59 



and scorned duplicity. He was honest and chiv- 
alrous, and hated everything that was sinister or 
mean. He was devoted to his work and showed 
no sign of self-seeking. Men sometimes serve 
God through their ambitions, but his ambition 
was to serve God. Dr. Hodge had been religious 
from childhood. The type of piety which he 
saw in his father, and in Dr. Archibald Alexander, 
whom he always reverenced as a saint and a sage, 
gave tone, I doubt not, to his religious experience. 
He had been chastened by sorrow. First his 
mother died, then the mother of his children 
passed away. He knew, therefore, how to inter- 
pret grief and to comfort others with the com- 
fort wherewith he himself had been comforted of 
God. I shall never forget the prayer he made at 
the funeral of a Christian physician : how, taking 
the varied threads of human experience, he wove 
them into a veil of exquisite texture, and laid 
it across the face of death — how in the seeming 
medley of earth's music, through changing keys 
and in spite of discord, he traced the love of 
Christ and found in it the motif that unified 
it all — how he led us along the winding way of 
life, from light to dark, from dark to light again, 



60 



until we entered the celestial city — and how he 
left us there alone with God. 

Dr. Hodge was deeply interested in the 
spiritual welfare of both the College and the 
Seminary. He was not simply a theological 
professor ; he was a great spiritual force. In a 
note received yesterday, Dr. McCosh says : " I 
will be glad if, in your notice of our friend Dr. 
A. A. Hodge, you mention that he is nearly as 
much missed in the College as in the Seminary. 
He took the deepest interest in us. He often 
preached to us, and preached with great felicity 
of illustration. From time to time he addressed 
our students at their prayer-meetings, and ever 
brought the weightiest truths to bear practically 
on character and life. We all feel that we have 
lost a friend : a loss to us, a gain to heaven 
above." A loss, indeed, to us, a gain to him and 
heaven. And so sweet thoughts are mingled 
with our sorrow. So are they comforted who 
called him father and to whom he was so dear. 
So finds she solace in her grief who wears to- 
day the drapery of widowhood. So they whose 
thought of him grows tender when memory 
brings back the far-off years, find resting-place 



61 



for hope in the Father's house of many mansions. 
He said that heaven was the " consummate flower 
of the universe " : he knows its beauty and its fra- 
grance now. He likened its welcome to that 
which a fond parent gives a beautiful daughter 
whose school-days are over: he knows to-day 
how far the reality transcends even his most 
tender thought. Those who loved him best will 
grudge him least his welcome home; and the 
pain of separation will be lessened when they 
think that it is only a little while, and then 
God's love shall set them at his side again. 

Dear friend, farewell ! Thy going has made 
Heaven near. Full many a vase of comely 
phrase I keep among my treasures as witness 
to the cunning of thy hand. Thy loving words 
shall live in memory's garden like sweet forget- 
me-nots : and I will hold the broken thread of 
our high discourse until we meet again. 



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